ID leaned into async pretty hard in lastest build of their engine for DOOM and Wolf 2, wouldn't be surprised to find out that the gains made by the RTX cards over their previous gen counterparts is down to that when executed properly (Titan V already demonstrated a big leap on that front).

The entire “RTX” line just feels...off. Every few years, it seems like there is that one GPU line that just doesn’t quite hit the mark, that’s how I feel about the RTX line. The huge die with an equally huge price tag, improvements that are there but not quite what we hoped for, heavily promoted for a feature that doesn’t even exist yet in the real world. I don’t know if they rushed this product line like some people are claiming, or if they just had manufacturing and development issues they couldn’t work out (I suspect the latter), but I’d be on the fence about upgrading my 1080ti even if they hadn’t priced these things so ridiculously. Nvidia has made it really easy for me to hold off upgrading this time around, I’ll just leave it at that.

My only issue is running a Asus Strix RTX against a FE pascal. I know my Strix 1080ti does better than a FE. I feel like this was a prime opportunity to put Strix vs Strix to get a more realistic generational improvement of cards a lot of people wait to buy. My 1080ti Strix is certainly pushing better clocks than those FE cards. I'm sure there was a reason for it, but personally I'd have prefer to see AIB high end cooler version VS the same counterpart.

My only issue is running a Asus Strix RTX against a FE pascal. I know my Strix 1080ti does better than a FE. I feel like this was a prime opportunity to put Strix vs Strix to get a more realistic generational improvement of cards a lot of people wait to buy. My 1080ti Strix is certainly pushing better clocks than those FE cards. I'm sure there was a reason for it, but personally I'd have prefer to see AIB high end cooler version VS the same counterpart.

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Sorry we did not do it exactly the way you wanted only having the cards for two days.

ID leaned into async pretty hard in lastest build of their engine for DOOM and Wolf 2, wouldn't be surprised to find out that the gains made by the RTX cards over their previous gen counterparts is down to that when executed properly (Titan V already demonstrated a big leap on that front).

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More testing is definitely needed, I'm thinking an entirely separate review in the future focused on DX12/Vulkan game advantages with Turing vs. Pascal, after we get past the full reviews on each card. At the very least I will include Sniper Elite 4 in the full review which uses DX12 and Async Compute as well.

The entire “RTX” line just feels...off. Every few years, it seems like there is that one GPU line that just doesn’t quite hit the mark, that’s how I feel about the RTX line. The huge die with an equally huge price tag, improvements that are there but not quite what we hoped for, heavily promoted for a feature that doesn’t even exist yet in the real world. I don’t know if they rushed this product line like some people are claiming, or if they just had manufacturing and development issues they couldn’t work out (I suspect the latter), but I’d be on the fence about upgrading my 1080ti even if they hadn’t priced these things so ridiculously. Nvidia has made it really easy for me to hold off upgrading this time around, I’ll just leave it at that.

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Someone posted in a different thread how many more CUDA cores they could have put in this GPU if Tensor Cores and RT Cores weren't a thing. It seems instead of brute forcing performance this gen, NVIDIA is all about introducing new features to bring developers and gamers into their eco system of features. It's not unprecedented, and only time will tell how well these GPUs hold up over the course of time. I look forward to testing RTX 5 years from now (similar to our generational GPU reviews we have previously done) to see how it holds up.

Looking forward to more numbers and more tests pushing things to their limits.

I know I post a lot of baaa Nvidiots type posts. But ya from a pure numbers point of view and not a market / tech one. It is good to see performance gains are decent even at less then 4k. Clearly if you have a nice 1440 monitor you intended to stick with for a few years this gen might be a bit underwhelming for the price. Still I will admit I wasn't sure actual testing we can trust would show 2080 really being any faster then a 1080ti. Overall not a bad showing at all really... it seems the issues with this generation come down to pricing and other NV related issues. The numbers from wolf are indeed insanity. Shows the true power of vulkan (although obviously ID have always been good at pushing APIs)... still 200+ FPS with crazy settings, nice.

Great but the only conclusion I can draw for my situation is that unless I go for the 2080ti the 2080 is useless as an upgrade compared to my Asus Strix 1080Ti OC that does 2070Mhz Core + 12400 Memory on water. Unless of course the 2080 cards overclock wonderfully. In any case even as it stands in this review that I trust, it is only the 2080ti that gives a sizable boost.

I am not going with a 4K monitor yet, not until Wide Gamuts, HDR, 120HZ+ and HDMI 2.1 with VRR are on sale for less than $1.5K, trouble free and at least 32" or even better 40" (not higher).

I will keep saving for the next GPU upgrade at the comfortable pace I am going so now and will keep watching how all this evolves with driver updates and new titles. I am almost certain though that by the time everything will be into place the next GPU releases will not be that far away. The only thing that might push me into an 2080Ti is the fact that I am building a new PC (8700K or 9 series) for my son and he needs a GPU (i.e. my 1080Ti) but it might still be worth it to look at a second hand Pascal given that he will be on a 1080p monitor.

The into says it all. Not sure how anyone can be impressed at this point with an incremental upgrade but whatever. Thanks fir the "box opening" and hardware throw down Im sure the full review when the actual API is available will be of more interest,

Nice pre-review and good to see some data from [H] on these things. What I found most disappointing about this is the lackluster (on average) differences between in some titles especially 1080Ti-2080 and minimum framerates from 10 to 20 series, this is what I look at, because it's what I'll notice the most. The 2080Ti had a lower minimum than a 2080 and 1080Ti on at least two titles...!! That's pretty shitty, nasty hitching on a card worth more than most peoples' computers. Sure, Kingdom come was CPU limited at one point, but the average wasn't much better either in that title.

These 2080 GPUs do not sacrifice rasterized performance for yet-to-be-realized RTX features

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Yes they do. Without them, the area for raster silicon would be 30+% higher, leading to at least another 20% performance, which would make the pricetag much easier to swallow, instead of a 1080p failtracing for the sake of pushing some closed standard like g-$tink.
Why else do you think the die is so big and power hungry? (Edit: 340W was not stock) Figure I'm wondering about is how much that'll be with that other 30% silicon in use..

I guess if AMD makes a 440W dual Vega 7nm that smashes the 3080Ti, then power use is a problem again?

The review looked good. I love that [H] puts in charts. You can really see where the CPU bottlenecks hit. I second that a quick VR review would be neat. Intel vs AMD CPUs might be more interesting though.

Can't even tell you how excited I was to see the Strix as one of the first AIB reviews. After owning a OC 1080TI Strix, I'm definitely a fanboy now. That thing has been an OC beast on air and easily gives the 2080fe a run for its money, at least without the special features. That being said the Strix 2080TI and MSI Duke seem to be the 2 contenders I'm looking at. I like the Strix for the custom PCB providing 2 HDMI 2.0b ports & 2 DP 1.4 vs the standard 3 DP's and 1 HDMI since I use one HDMI for audio to my receiver and the other to the t.v. However, if production models are consistent, there's rumors of the MSI having 2x8 pin and a 1x6pin. It's also rumored that the MSI has a custom BIOS for the power. Not sure if needed, but might play a role in serious OC'ing. So far, the few places I've seen test both have then neck and neck. Meanwhile, though, I can't even find a U.S. site to order the Strix 2080TI.

My general take so far is that since I play at 1440p, I can do just fine with my Corsair 1080Ti in the games I'm currently playing. What's going to be interesting is when I want to play games that have DLSS or Ray-Tracing support, I'm very curious to see how those games perform on the RTX cards with the new features active. Certainly not well enough to justify the cost of a 2080Ti, at least not yet.

I do commend Nvidia for bringing something new to the table in terms of DLSS and in-game Ray-Tracing. There's no denying the improvements in visual quality they bring. I'm also curious to see how Nvidia balances the new core types in future cards, will they continue to increase the number of CUDA cores or focus more on adding more RT cores to reduce the performance hit from enabling ray-tracing?

Any suspicions on where the CPU bottleneck is coming in? IPC or threads? It would be hard to fix the former, but with the 8th gen CPU's and the Ryzen processors out, a thread bottleneck would be easy to address.

Any suspicions on where the CPU bottleneck is coming in? IPC or threads? It would be hard to fix the former, but with the 8th gen CPU's and the Ryzen processors out, a thread bottleneck would be easy to address.

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I would GUESS IPC from what I know about the engines there. Gaming threading getting wider, but it has not gotten that much wider in the games we are testing. Gaming is still about clocks for the most part and gaming is still overall GPU-limited above 1440p...until you start stepping up to 1080 Ti GPU levels of perf.

Great review as always and looking forward to the upcoming in depth review(s). The funny thing about the early numbers is that it shows just how much power the 1080Ti has under the hood and that it still gives excellent performance even compared to it's successor.

Nice review. This reminds me of the 8800GTX and 8800GTS launch, DX10 was the new thing but there were no DX10 games to be had. When DX10 did release in a game or patch the performance wasn't so great. So the two main selling points of the RTX cards but no games to see how they perform. So yes these cards are faster but so far thats it. They didn't really impress me at 1440P, especially the 2080RTX and not for the price they are asking. Im sure the 2080TI will find a home with some of the 4K gamers but at 1440P not much to see here. I think the 2070 will be a big disappointment when reviewed, and typically that is what I would buy, but prices like these will keep me a generation or so behind.

The performance is great however people like myself who want to go SLI immediately on the 2080 cannot even get the NV LINK adapter so why even buy now, on top of that every retailer limits its purchase to 1 unit. I will just stick to my 1080 for the next 3 months until the price drops , probably right before christmas time.

Ebay coupons will be out and stock will be plentiful hopefully and my guess is AMD will announce something soon within that time. This has been a overall bad launch and IMO unless Ray tracing can be be benched on games vs the 1080TI then I will pass even though I am on 4k monitor .

My library of games is so big and back log i can easily be satisfied the next year not getting this card and all these so called AAA titles are not that great

Looking forward to the full review. For me, I'm still on my OC'd 980ti, and while I could afford a 2080ti, I can't stomach spending over $1000 for that card.

I'm considering jumping up to a 2080 as it's only a few $ more than a 1080ti, and it looks like there may be not only more performance to be gained through OC, but also more features than a 1080ti as well. Anyone else coming from a 980ti? What are your plans?

Not on a 980ti, but a 970. I for one will continue to sit on this for another year (or 2?). I really want to see if AMD can answer; otherwise I'll wait for 7nm. Yeah, I can't have all the eye candy turned on anymore. Oh well...beats dropping a mortgage payment on a video card.

That 2080 ti being close to double the performance of my 1080 would normally make me want to pick one up. But at 1200-1300 plus i'll need a new water block I just can't do it yet. Plus the fact i'm really thinking about going gsync monitor @ 1440 vs my 40inch at 4k. I really miss having more then 60hz. So figure droping down to 1440 with my sli 1080's i'll be fine another year or 2 till something better comes out.

I'm building my girlfriend a gaming PC for her birthday and just ordered a Gigabyte 1080Ti this morning for $649 for the build instead.

The RTX 2080 is tempting, but it's still $200 more, and I don't see the performance advantages yet to be really worth it. I'm also a little disappointed in how NVIDIA priced and released these cards, and I really don't want to give them the $$ as a reward for that.

Looking forward to the full review. For me, I'm still on my OC'd 980ti, and while I could afford a 2080ti, I can't stomach spending over $1000 for that card.

I'm considering jumping up to a 2080 as it's only a few $ more than a 1080ti, and it looks like there may be more not only more performance to be gained through OC, but also more features than a 1080ti as well. Anyone else coming from a 980ti? What are your plans?

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I am in waiting mode at the moment. I will wait for the 2070 and some actual games with RT support before finally deciding what to do. I am considering buying either the 2070 or the 2080 if they can handle RT gracefully (above 60 fps @ 1080p).